Monday, February 24, 2014

Woodrow Wilson and Walter Bagehot

Woodrow Wilson

Many people are unaware that Woodrow Wilson was a disciple
of Walter Bagehot, who derived his theories in part from Thomas Hobbes, the
totalitarian political philosopher. Not surprisingly, then, Wilson was an
elitist who had a deep suspicion and mistrust of ordinary people, as well as
those he seemed to view as demagogues, such as William Jennings Bryan and Theodore
Roosevelt. Bryan was someone to be used to counter Roosevelt, a sort of a
backfire, or (perhaps more consistent with Wilson’s attitude) a thief to catch
a thief.

This, of course, raises the issue of Bagehot’s political
theories.

Walter Bagehot

Bagehot developed his political and economic theories in light
of the abandonment of the natural law and the fixed belief that only existing
accumulations of savings can be used to finance new capital formation that
characterized the 17th and 18th centuries following
Hobbes. According to Bagehot’s analysis, published in 1867 in The English Constitution, a relatively
small economic elite (not to be confused with the “Upper Ten Thousand” that
ruled “society”) were the real power in the country, having gradually usurped
political power since the days of the Tudors, and (according to Bagehot)
properly so.

Bagehot carefully distinguished leadership in “society”
(meaning parties, balls, race meets, and so on) from leadership in government
and the economy. The Queen (a “retired widow”) and the Prince of Wales (“an
unemployed youth”) were the leaders of “society” and played an important role
in providing the lower classes with the easily understood fallacy that the
monarch ruled the country. Bagehot called this the “dignified” aspect of the
English Constitution, a social convention to pacify the unintelligent masses.

Thomas Hobbes

The real power, according to Bagehot, resided in the House
of Commons, the House of Lords being another “dignified” aspect of the
Constitution of the country. The House of Commons was “efficient” as opposed to
“dignified,” and, so far as the traditional structures of government allowed,
ran the country essentially as a business corporation. The House of Commons,
elected by a relatively small number of voters, was, essentially, the board of
directors of the country, “a class . . . trained to thought, full of money, and
yet trained to business.”

The propertied classes were (in a sense) the shareholders of
the national corporation. Common unpropertied people, as well as aristocrats
whose wealth and power were in decline as agriculture diminished in relative
importance, were to some extent supernumeraries, that is, redundant employees
and pensioners of the national corporate State.

Theodore Roosevelt

Contrary to the impression that Bagehot’s claim that ultimate
power resided in the House of Commons might give, Bagehot did not support
popular sovereignty. The English electorate at the time he wrote, 1867, was
extremely small, and composed exclusively of men of property, a financial elite
which thereby secured a self-perpetuating political power — the “pocket” or
“rotten borough” system. This was only right as far as Bagehot was concerned. He
believed that the masses were too stupid to be able to vote or do anything
other than take orders:

“We have in a great
community like England crowds of people scarcely more civilized than the
majority of two thousand years ago; we have others, even more numerous, such as
the best people were a thousand years since. The lower orders, the middle
orders, are still, when tried by what is the standard of the educated ‘ten
thousand’, narrow-minded, unintelligent, incurious.”

“We have whole
classes unable to comprehend the idea of a constitution.”

“A free nation rarely
can be — and the English nation is not — quick of apprehension.”

William Jennings Bryan

According to Bagehot, “The principle of popular government
is that the supreme power, the determining efficacy in matters political,
resides in the people — not necessarily or commonly in the whole people, in the
numerical majority, but in a chosen
people, a picked and selected people.” [Emphasis in original.] Not
surprisingly, one of the “defects” Bagehot listed in the American system is the
impossibility of a dictatorship in times of national emergency. Another problem
is that Americans do not accept the opinions of their betters without question:
“They have not a public opinion finished and chastened as that of the English
has been finished and chastened.”

Natural rights, the judiciary, — such things are irrelevant.
They are unimportant because they are not “efficient,” that is, they do not
increase the effectiveness of government, the purpose of which is to protect
the interests of the propertied classes who run the country. Weaknesses appear
in government to the extent that the State administration departs from the
principles of business, e.g., lack of
efficient structure, unnecessary redundancy, etc.

The fact that many of these structures were at least
initially intended to provide accountability of the government to the citizens
is also irrelevant. The capitalist of Bagehot’s day — or, more accurately, the
non-owning manager — was not accountable to his workforce or to his customers.
It followed that the government should not be accountable to the citizens it
governed.